‘An unusual case in any age’ … Charlotte Brontë, depicted in a drawing by George Richmond.
Photograph: Apic/ Getty Images

It’s daunting to write about Jane Eyre 200 years after Charlotte Brontë’s birth. It’s not just that so many people have read and loved (and, yes, also hated) this book. It’s also the difficulty of understanding that Jane’s intimate, confiding voice may not speak to us as directly as we may think.

Among Brontë’s many talents is an ability to make you feel that you are seeing the world just as her narrator does. There’s the cosy way she draws us into the story with that direct address to “you”, the “reader” whom she invites constantly to see what she sees. We fancy we are also seeing a room in the George Inn at Millcote, visible to us “by the light of an oil lamp hanging from the ceiling”, straining to see the exact same scene under the same flickering light as Jane. But it isn’t just what Jane sees that matters: Brontë also takes us deep into her head and, seemingly, her soul. Even when she says, “Gentle reader, you may never feel what I then felt!” we think otherwise. Her “stormy, scalding, heart-wrung tears” seem real, her “agonised prayers” honestly accounted, her “dread” clear and comprehensible.

Jane Eyre is April's Reading group book

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Reading Group contributor RabBurnout puts it neatly: “The thing is, of course, to read the book oneself, and experience it viscerally – it is definitely a book that the reader forms a powerful personal response to, I think.”

I got to the end of the novel feeling as if I had shared something with Jane – that her experience was mixed into mine and that I had felt as she had felt. So it was confounding to reflect again and realise that, of course, I hadn’t fully understood her. It wasn’t just that she is an unreliable narrator, often concealing her own feelings from herself and her reader; often claiming that black is white, that St John is an admirable, good man, that she’s calm and unflustered when Rochester knows her heart is beating like a steam piston. It’s also that there is much about Jane’s (and by extension, Charlotte Brontë’s) world that I don’t comprehend and for which I can’t feel much sympathy.

The most obvious sticking point is religion. There was a fascinating discussion on last week’s Reading Group thread about how hard it is for us to gauge Jane’s sincerity when it comes to her Christian faith, particularly her attitude to her cousin St John’s missionary zeal. Is there part of her that remains the proud “pagan” and rebel she declares herself to be in the early pages? Does she say one thing and mean another when she professes her desire to be subservient to Christian ideals? Is her abiding love for Rochester something she maintains in spite of (and in opposition to) the Church’s teachings on marriage – or is there a more complex set of relationships and internal conflicts going on? Does the mean, religious Brocklehurst express a deep truth about men of faith? Or is he more simply a bad apple? Is it possible for us, who’ve been lucky enough to have grown up in a largely secular society, to feel the deep currents of faith and propriety that sway Jane?

That last question prompts another: who are we to judge? Would Jane Eyre (or Brontë) think much of my disregard for Christian feeling? Would she think much of the accompanying implication that we live in a better, more sophisticated age?

How would it feel to argue with either woman about such things? I can imagine Jane Eyre opening up a pretty fizzy can of whoop-ass (most of us wouldn’t present much challenge after Mr Rochester, after all). But I’m being fanciful – if I’ve gone too far, it’s a mark of how real Jane seems and how much life we can imagine for her outside the book.

I’m also keen to imagine meeting Brontë on her own terms. We in the present have a tendency to patronise those in the past. It’s easy to think we are more sophisticated because we now know more about – say – the early history of Christianity. Or because Brontë is, of course, ignorant of modern feminist theory, or poststructuralism. We can bring readings to her work that she couldn’t begin to imagine.

But she could easily turn the tables on us: in 1847, Brontë was a gateway to the future (as the fact that we are reading her today so neatly proves). She lived in a sophisticated and complicated world, one whose codes and unwritten rules, whose morality and intellectual structure, would baffle even the most learned among us.

It’s also worth remembering that Brontë would be an unusual case in any age. She was a writer of perception, intelligence and stylistic genius. But she was also an oddball: curiously old-fashioned – with her borrowing of gothic horror tropes and her smouldering Byronic leading man – Brontë was also unusually forward-thinking in her depiction of the plight of governesses and insistence that intelligent women’s work had value. Crucially, she was an outsider, cut off from the main literary circuit in Haworth, far from the great metropolis where titans such as William Thackeray and Charles Dickens held sway. Indeed, she had once regarded London as a place of unimaginable danger and vice. When Brontë’s friend Ellen Nussey visited the city in 1834, Charlotte even wrote a letter to her afterwards, expressing her astonishment that Ellen had returned “unchanged”.

She was a writer of perception and stylistic genius, but she was also an oddball

Even more telling is Brontë’s relationship with Thackeray. She was sharp enough to understand his genius, even dedicating the second edition of Jane Eyre to him because of her rich appreciation for Vanity Fair. Unfortunately, she was also distant enough from literary gossip to not know that Thackeray had hidden his wife away in an asylum (not the ideal recipient for a book about a mad woman in an attic). Their meetings were also tinged with confusion: Charlotte was initially said to be dumbstruck when she met her idol – and confused when he started talking about the scent of cigars, not realising he was making a flattering reference to the scene in chapter XXIII where the smell of Mr Rochester’s cigar sets Jane aflutter.

Similar misunderstandings abounded when he organised a party in Brontë’s honour, in 1849. The trouble this time was that she refused to acknowledge she was Currer Bell (the pseudonym she’d used on the early publication of Jane Eyre) and would only give sharp, short answers. (“I do and I don’t,” she snapped, when other guests tried to ascertain if she liked London society women.) Thackeray eventually sneaked out of his own party to go to his club.

Anne, Thackeray’s daughter, later recalled: “This then is the authoress, the unknown power whose books have set all London talking, reading, speculating … We all smile as my father stoops to offer his arm; for, genius as she may be, Miss Brontë can barely reach his elbow … And everyone waited for the brilliant conversation which never began at all.” It’s reassuring at least to know that Brontë’s contemporaries were just as able as we are to patronise her – and to feel that curious mix of intimate understanding and baffled difference.